Purity

"From purity springs that singular beauty that permeates every sphere of reciprocal common life between human beings and allows them to express in it the simplicity and depth, the cordiality and unrepeatable authenticity of personal trust." Source: Pope St. John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them, Pauline Books and Media, 2006. [...]

"If purity disposes man to 'keep his own body with holiness and reverence,' as we read in 1 Thessalonians 4:3-5, piety as a gift of the Holy Spirit seems to serve purity in a particular way by making the human subject sensitive to the dignity that belongs to the human body in virtue of the [...]

"If you do not possess humility, you will not long remain pure, because pride sullies the soul. You may be charitable as much as one can be with pride; you may have the virtues of purity, mortification, and zeal, but if they are not all guarded and nourished by humility, they are lost. Pride dissipates [...]

"Purity as a Christian virtue is revealed in the Pauline letters as an effective way of detaching oneself from what is a fruit of the concupiscence of the flesh in the human heart. Abstaining 'from unchastity,' which implies keeping the body 'with holiness and reverence,' allows us to deduce that according to the Apostle’s teaching, [...]

"In the first place, purity is an “ability” or, in the traditional language of anthropology and ethics, an attitude. And in this sense it is a virtue. When this ability, that is, virtue, leads to abstaining 'from unchastity,' it does so because the man who possesses it knows 'how to keep his own body with [...]

"Then God eternal said: 'I am letting you know, dearest daughter, that in this sacrament I demand of you and of them the greatest purity that is possible to humanity in this life – so much so that you for your part as well as they ought to constantly strive to attain it. You should [...]

"Purity consists above all in holding back the impulses of sense-desire, which has as its object what is bodily and sexual in man. Purity is a variant of the virtue of temperance." Source: Pope St. John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them, Pauline Books and Media, 2006.

"For every one, the absolute and necessary price of heaven, is fidelity to his own grace, to his particular grace. God does not demand from all an equal measure of merits and virtues; but there is, nevertheless, one measure strictly required, one condition essential for all, and that is the state of grace. One must [...]

"Christ opposed it (external moral purity) in a radical manner: nothing makes a man unclean 'from the outside'; no 'material' dirtiness makes a man impure in a moral sense. No washing, not even ritual washing, is by itself suited to produce moral purity. Moral purity has its wellspring exclusively in man’s interior: it comes from [...]